Shopify Plus is an extended enterprise level commerce application that has been designed to make it simpler to sell online and in person. In February of 2017 Star Digital became one of the first Shopify Plus partners in the UK and we are looking forward to developing our Connector Plus agnostic systems integration software to open up this platform to larger and more complex merchant requirements.

Whether you are looking to sell a million a year or a million a day, Shopify Plus is built to make delivery of those goals as low maintenance and cost efficient as possible. With over 2,500 clients using the Shopify Plus, Shopify is focussed on high growth, high volume merchants who don’t want the added complexity of ongoing hosting and maintenance charges – particularly software patching incidents that might be a threat to the security of their business.

Shopify Plus – multi-device, omni-channel commerce at a fraction of the cost of other enterprise commerce solutions

Key Operational Advantages with Shopify Plus

Shopify Plus ships with core support and maintenance included covering the important operational cost base areas of;

Application Management

Database Administration

Application Performance Monitoring (APM)

Security Patching

Security Auditing

Application upgrades

Application Bug Fixes

Competitor products such as Magento and WooCommerce do not manage these elements for the merchant, but rely on the merchant being aware of the issues and working with a 3rd party to fix/patch as required. This represents an operational time and cost overhead for the merchant, to be managed by the marketing or IT teams and to be included on their e-commerce governance checklists.

When it comes to hosting its important to understand its all included in the price, its a cloud based fully hosted SaaS solution built on an infrastructure that includes a massive 8000+ CPU cores and 200Tb of data storage. It offers 99.99% server uptime and can handle in excess of 8,000 orders every minute. With over $29 billion of transactions already processed through the Shopify hosting system you can be sure its robust and most importantly not your responsibility as a merchant, so its operationally cost effective. Add to that the 24×7 priority support should anything go wrong and you can be sure you’re in good hands.

Shopify Plus is simplifying enterprise level deployments and typically requires 1/3rd of the time that a similar project would take in a competitor product such as Magento Enterprise. This allows merchants to earmark more budget to a quality front end build out and support services such as PLA feeds, marketplace integrations, SEO and email automation.

The Shopify Plus open canvas and liquid templating is entirely agnostic to presentation, themes can be completely customised using unrestricted design to deliver compelling responsive front end experiences, and these can be delivered by less senior front end developers, making budget go further still. The load speed on Shopify Plus is fully optimised making the sites extremely fast, all of which helps with user experience and Google reputation.

With over 1,300 current apps in the Shopify App ecosystem including tools for easy migration from other e-commerce platforms alongside marketplace integrations and ERP/WMS/OMS connectors the Shopify Plus application has matured considerably.

The integrated Shopify Plus channel management is impressive, with packaged services for selling on Facebook, Pinterest, Houzz and more. The channel software development kit enables us to connect to any number of marketplaces and channels and the Shopify POS system allows you to take payments in person on a mobile device. There’s even a free mobile app for iPhone that allows merchants to manage their stores on the go.

Shopify also understand the importance of being able to run e-commerce promotions anywhere, and they’ve introduced a lightweight js library that allows us to add a buy button to any web page that generates a checkout url for a single product or an entire mixed cart of items. This makes the addition of a shopping cart to an existing microsite or informational site really easy.

Who Should Look at Shopify Plus?

The Shopify Plus environment is ideal for existing Shopify clients that are seeing high growth and moving through the £400K pa ceiling and require closer account management and access to merchant success managers to help them develop their commerce success.

Merchants looking to migrate from other enterprise platforms that are adding to the cost base through excess development, hosting, support/patching costs and increasing licensing costs or speed issues would find it advantageous to do a cost comparison as part of any RFI process.

Brands looking for speed to market for niche product or new product e-commerce or high volume flash sales. Brands who run their business on flash sale model should be aware that if you need it delivered fast, and able to cope with large campaign driven volumes, involving large email and TV campaigning Shopify Plus has a RESTful API that supports rapid integration and auto scaling high volume cloud hosting. It makes sense to have the Shopify Plus solution on your RFI.

As a Shopify Plus partner we offer full service design, user experience, 3rd party systems integration and retained marketing service contracts wrapped around the Shopify Plus product and we are happy to discuss upgrades from Shopify standard, crossgrades from Magento and WooCommerce and of course new RFI’s for enterprise level e-commerce projects.

To see examples of Shopify Plus designed stores check out the Beautiful Stores Blog, and check out the Oreo case study to see how a major brand got to market with a smart ecommerce concept in just 2 months!

We know that Shopify Plus can deliver budget efficiency at the outset, and your total cost of ownership (TCO) is much more efficient than it would be with Magento, NetSuite, Hybris or Demandware. The increased margin potential for high volume sellers is significant. Please get in touch with us to find out what the TCO would look like on your project. We’re fully backed up by the channel partner team, including the launch team and the merchant success managers. We work together and would be happy to go over any RFI’s and put together discovery calls to see how Shopify Plus can benefit your commerce business.

Call +44 1604 696385 or email info@star-digital.co.uk and speak to Shelley or Roger.

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